Fans pick 100 books like The Missing Diplomats

The journalist  and Labour politician Tom Driberg had known Guy Burgess in London. After Burgess appeared publicly at a press conference in February 1956 five years after his flight to Russia, Driberg approached him asking to write his authorised life and Burgess agreed. In the absence of a memoir, this biography, based on a series of interviews, is our nearest insight into the spy’s mind set tracing his alienation from the Establishment from his school days at Eton, his politicisation at Cambridge University, concerns about McCarthyism whilst in Washington to the escape to Russia.

The writer and academic, Goronwy Rees, was one of Burgess’s closest friends and this volume of memoir best conveys Burgess’s character and charm. The two men saw much of each other during the 1930s, and Rees was one of Burgess’s first recruits, but the relationship foundered when Rees decided during the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 to stop spying and threatened to betray his friend. After Burgess surfaced in Moscow, Rees penned a series of sensational articles about Burgess’s dissolute private life, probably as a damage limitation exercise, which backfired and led him to losing his academic post but he soon was to have his revenge.

A landmark espionage book about the Cambridge Spies, which has stood up surprisingly well though published almost forty years ago and before the release of Russian and British archives, and first  made me  interested in ‘The Climate of Treason’.  It not only gives the historical background to their recruitment during the 1930s but, drawing on a deathbed confession from Goronwy Rees, named two new spies ‘Maurice’ and ‘Basil’. After leaks to the satirical magazine Private Eye , Margaret Thatcher confirmed that ‘Maurice’ was the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures  Sir Anthony Blunt who had been granted immunity sixteen years earlier. ‘Basil’ was identified as an atomic scientist, serving in the Washington Embassy alongside Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, called Wilfrid Mann. Mann fended off the accusations at the time and the story died but subsequent research for my book has proved Mann was a spy.

Kim Philby’s most personal betrayal was not of Nicholas Elliott, as suggested in Ben McIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends , but his school friend and another MI6 colleague Tim Milne , the nephew of Winnie the Pooh author AA Milne, whom he falsely accused of being a spy in order to deflect attention from himself. Milne’s memoirs were finally permitted to be published four years after his death and provide a fascinating and fresh glimpse into both Philby and Burgess especially Milne’s teenage European travels with Philby and his August 1948 visit to Philby in Turkey where he remembered fellow guest Burgess ‘lolling in a window seat, dirty, unshaven, wearing nothing but an inadequately fastened dressing-gown”, singing on jeep rides into the countryside and  diving into the Bosphorus from a second floor balcony.

This biography of Guy Burgess has been selected because of the sheer impressive material which Lownie brings together as a result of 20 years of research. He has provided an illuminated and extensively researched biography that does not shy from laying out the full extent of Burgess’s deception and hedonistic behaviour, as well as the real risks he posed to Western intelligence services and State Secrets. The publicly educated and privileged Cambridge Five, who betrayed their country for ideological motives, arrogantly believed that they had the right to pass Western secrets to Russia. In spite of the brutality of the Stalinist regime, they believed in the communist cause and deceived everyone around them in Britain—their work colleagues, families, and friends. That deception ran dangerously into the Cold War and led finally to the defection of Burgess and his friend Donald Maclean to Moscow in 1951. Their defection caused huge ramifications… show more.

The reason I recommend this book is because it is so different from most spy thrillers.

The hero,  Kit Carradine, is not a spy. He is a writer living a boring life in London. His father was a spy, however. He gets recruited to do a small job for the Service. When he agrees, his life is changed. Kit is different from the Jack Reachers and Ryans.

He is a professionally naive, and often in over his head, which provides readers a fresh and accessible vantage to the typical genre tropes.

I discovered the Pearl Saga (a trilogy) via Van Lustbader taking up the reins on Robert Ludlum’s Bourne novels. While I was reading these books, I was waiting to hear from Voyager (Harper Collins) regarding an epic fantasy novel I wrote, which featured in its climactic scenes a girl using crystals to trap a dragon in a cage-like device inside a mountain. There was a delay in the publication of the third book of the Pearl Saga, and when it came out, it featured a girl holding a ‘crystal’ before a dragon, and it was called The Cage of Nine Banestones. My heart sank, but it turned out that the delay was related to the death of Van Lustbader’s father.

The trilogy begun in ‘Ring’ is for some brooding and self-indulgent, but for me it was a triumph of worldbuilding and alien realia, with technology and sorcery vying… show more.

Sowell doesn’t let political sensitivities stop him from asking and answering the basic questions that most people have about inequality between ethnic groups in the United States and around the world.

He has little sympathy for conventional left-wing theories, but he does show respect for each group of people, celebrating achievements and pointing out barriers to opportunity. The book is rich with insight and intelligent commentary. His faith in the dignity of common people—including his readers—shines through.

While most Americans make charitable gifts every year, people don’t give at uniform rates—there are vast differences by faith, family structure, political views, geography, and business involvement. For instance, people who worship every week give away three times as much money as those who rarely or never worship, and religious people are twice as likely to volunteer (for secular as well as faith-based causes).

Brooks shows that generosity isn’t just healthy for the nation; it makes the givers happier as well. He cites a host of social science studies demonstrating that charitable Americans are much more likely to be satisfied with life than non-givers who are demographically identical.

The adrenaline rush I got from this novel, I cannot express by words. I detested banking and related stories until I read this novel. The book gave me a totally different view of banking and the politics involved. I was impressed by the character of the single mom Juanita Nunez and her unique ability to calculate like a machine as she had a photographic memory.